UFOs are anomalous (to the retina and mind) images provoked by a slew of possibilities.

Our opinion is that UFOs, while continuing to show up for some, are defunct as a concrete phenomenon, extinct for scientific and practical purposes.

The intangibility of UFOs smack of quantum artifacts – particles with the attribute of waves, non-substantial as it were.

UFOs cannot be made real in any sense of the word since they are affected by their observation or measurement; that is, they are altered or made “visible” by the instruments observing them. They do not exist, like quantum artifacts, in any one place (they are non-local) or at any one measurable moment in time. They do not exist in space or time as we know it.

UFO mavens, by the very nature of their non-scientific approach to the subject, have beclouded the phenomenon.

The disparate banalities of those who long ago took over the topic of flying saucers and/or UFOs have prevented right-minded, disciplined persons (including scientists) from burrowing into the phenomenon, lest they be tarred by the often egotistical ramblings of the subliminally insane element holding sway in the UFO universe.

Therefore, today we find UFOs extinct, as a real reality. It only exists in the quantum world, alive or dead, depending upon the observer, the measurement. It no longer exists in the real world, and hasn’t for several years now.

There have been no recent – and that’s the word we’re accenting: recent -- film or video of UFOs that resonate as images of a real phenomenon – structured or otherwise.

There has been no conclusive resolution of some major UFO/flying saucer events: Roswell in particular and Kenneth Arnold’s slippery observation of 1947 for example.

(The Lonnie Zamora/Socorro episode of 1964 has been solved. He saw a Hughes Aircraft test vehicle.)

Those still in the thrall of UFOs have fallen back on the old events because there are no new UFO events equatable with the older episodes. UFOs are dead.

10 Comments:

"There have been no recent . . . film or video of UFOs that resonate as images of a real phenomenon – structured or otherwise," you say.

Not long ago I would have agreed with you whole-heartedly. I presented you on Saturday with just such a video, however: evidence that shatters your assertion. If you haven't done so, paste this link into your browser window and take a look:

http://m90.org/index.php?id=15094

This video clip, shot from the space shuttle, clearly shows the same phenomenon one can see in the 1963 film you linked to, a film you described as having "specificity."

I am a published scientific researcher, and presently a law student - both practices which require one to set aside preconceptions and biases, and to observe material evidence objectively. As I said on Saturday, I saw an identical UFO only last July. My father, who witnessed the object with me, is a veteran photojournalist who has taken pictures that you have seen yourself, if you read the newspapers. We are not easily taken in, nor quick to latch on to easy answers. How then to deal with undeniable evidence of the strange?

We are neither of us "believers" in ETs, back-engineered flying saucers, or angels driving chariots of fire - we simply have seen, with our own eyes, an object, which flew, and which could not be identified - something that was indistinguishable from the phenomenon your 1963 film and this 1990s NASA video show.

People often forget that UFO stands for "unidentified flying object." To say that the unidentified does not exist is to deny wonder, and all possibility of future knowledge. To deny evidence of it is to put blinders on.

Your argument is mere semantics. Furthermore, you do not address the fallacy inherent in your presentation of one form of evidence as somehow more real (the 1963 film) than another (the NASA video). Your Saturday posting unequivocally stated that the old film shows that UFOs had some more material existence in the past, and in both that posting and today's you say that that materiality no longer exists.

By defining the terms amorphously you only fog the issues.

No phenomenon can assert its presence in the realm of the senses, and thus in "reality," but by a quantum expression. By definition, quantum uncertainty simply describes the limitations of our perceptual prison.

We do not perceive "reality" directly (as I imagine you know, since you use the term "quantum" so freely), but can only perceive the sensory nerve impulses that stimulate the perception centers of our brains, activated (we can only assume) by events which occur "outside" of us. Due to this perceptual uncertainty created by our physical hardware (analogous to the quantum uncertainty principle in physics) we can only make an educated guess that some outside reality impinges upon our sensory organs.

"Reality" is all in your head. The baselessness of existential truth forces this supremely skeptical position.

Measurable phenomena can only exist by virtue of the measurement. Nothing else meaningful can be said of anything. A tree that falls may (or may not) make a sound, but to say anything meaningful about the sound - indeed, even to say the sound exists - one must measure it. Schroedinger's cat is both alive and dead until someone looks inside the quantum chamber. Our measurement creates the only truth that can be measured: an interesting existential tautology.

A challenge: describe to me a phenomenon which can be shown to have a non-quantum existence. Einsteinian reality can only be imaginary. It's expression can only be quantum by definition.

Download the video and play it full screen. A total of nine identical, unidentified objects, obviously flying above and through the atmosphere, can easily be seen - four or five of them undoubtedly moving below the surface of the cloud layer.

Define UFO if not an "unidentified" "object" that "flies." I assert nothing else about the phenomenon but that it's "unidentified."

About speed and location (which you should know are mutually exclusive in quantum theory), what difference do those relative qualities make? They are just as difficult to discern in the 1963 film, after all. The phenomena in the video still cannot be identified, they still fly, and they still appear to be objects - no more nor less than those in the film. How can you not see this? If a UFO moves at 500 kph or 5,000, if it's at 25 kilometers altitute or 250, does any of that change its identity, when that identity is, per se, unidentified?

In addition, the altitude of a space flight must by definition be above the atmosphere, and some of the objects in the video obviously move through it, so one could roughly estimate size and distance with a little research into the depth of the atmosphere, common cruising altitude of shuttle flights, etc. The velocity could similarly be found by comparing the visible curvature to the circumference of the earth. That's just math, but I can't take the time to work out the variables. In contrast, the lack of a distant point of reference makes any such estimates in relation to the film totally speculative.

I would like to say that I think you may be onto something when you seem to assert that UFOs manifest non-locally, and in conjunction with the observer (as do quantum particles). The one my father and I saw last summer appeared out of nowhere, moved rapidly across the sky, and disappeared suddenly. Our experience suggests also that the consciousness of the observer may interact with the phenomenon, as we had been talking about UFOs (something we had never discussed seriously before) when the sighting occurred.

I only argue with your sloppy reasoning re the film and the video, and your foggy conclusion that something observable no longer "exists." Perhaps you have an axe to grind, I don't know.

P.S. About my ontological challenge: your use of qualifications like "seem tangible" and "as best as we can tell" only illustrates my point. You could be living in a virtual reality - indeed, we all could be computer simulations - and would never know. Uncertainty rules all. You can only be "certain" of the probability of your existence, not of your existence itself. Descartes, bless his heart, lived in a simpler time.

The NASA film – what is its date, by the way? – is interesting of course. But it doesn’t provoke a “Gosh, those are alien spacecraft!” kind of response.

The images are UFOs – or better Unidentified Aerial Phenomena. They don’t seem to be “objects” and they don’t seem to be flying in the same way that the 1963 Colorado UFO is.

What current (in the past few years) UFO sighting has the attributes of the Colorado sighting.

The NASA film resembles the plethora of Mexican UFOs filmed or captured on video.

The Mexican UFOs are either hoaxes or a phenomenon unique to that country. (We have no opinion either way as the Mexican sightings are inconsequential in the great scheme of things,)

The dearth of interesting UFO sightings nowadays indicates to us that UFOs are moribund, extinct even, as we wrote and maintain.

The NASA film can’t resurrect the phenomenon. It belongs in that category of arguable sightings that “ufologists” can chew over, ad infinitum, ad eternum, ad nauseum.

And since we also maintain many UFOs are quantum artifacts – not the classic sightings which, again, we’ll go over here, upcoming – and must be addressed with quantum hypotheses.

Like archeologists, we’re dealing with a dead construct, not to revive it but to place it in its proper cultural or historical context.

UFOs are a phenomenal quirk that has no relevance to society or civilization itself, even assuming that the historical (and especially Biblical) accounts actually were about visitation by purposeful UFOs.

We’ll be presenting more material to bolster our contention that UFOs are quantum and dead, like Schrodinger’s cat.

You switch terms and jump from subject to subject, which only garbles your reasoning (I now feel that this may be intentional). Just a few things before I give up any hope of finding a rational discussion here:

1) You obviously don't understand the Schroedinger's cat illustration at all, which shows that you have completely missed the point of the revolution in modern physics. The cat cannot be said to be dead or alive: that dualism reflects Aristotelian either/or logic, outdated for centuries now. The cat's state is context-specific: dead, alive, dead and alive, neither dead nor alive - the cat "is" in all these states at once, and remains so until the observer measures the quantum state of the particle. This illustrates the essential paradox of quantum uncertainty: that observation determines measurement.

2) You never said we were talking about "alien spacecraft." You reveal your bias by assuming that I have been. UFOs, as I have said repeatedly, can only be described as "unidentified." The jump from that to space ships from another world forms a conclusion, and terminates discussion of the "unidentified." Your apparent fear of the indeterminable reminds me of Einstein's inability to accept quantum uncertainty, as evidenced by his famous declaration that "God does not play dice with the universe." His preconceptions and vested notions had blinded him to data that did not fit his paradigm. Like you seem to be doing, Einstein closed his eyes in denial of what those eyes were showing him.

3) Finally, I don't see how the phenomena depicted in the Colorado film differ significantly from those in the NASA video. For new readers, here are the links again:

How can one speeding, glowing oval seem more like an object than another - apparently identical - speeding, glowing oval? Furthermore, this footage bears no resemblance to the Mexico videos. The Mexico clips that I have seen all show things which could be planes, birds, planets, balloons, flares, or heat plumes from smokestacks viewed from the air. None of these identifications could in any rational way be applied to the space shuttle video.

You remind me of the Sophists, who argued only in order to arrive at a predetermined conclusion - never hoping, like the true lover of knowledge, to illuminate what is hidden.

You have obviously gotten stuck to your belief in a lack of evidence, and nothing you see or hear will alter your bias. "Belief stops thought," a wise man once said.

I only wonder why you cling so desperately to that belief, when you yourself say that "UFOs are a phenomenal quirk that has no relevance to society or civilization itself." You seem to spend a lot of time arguing the irrelevant.

You and we are talking about UFOs as unidentified images on video or film.

The discussion here has become convoluted unfortunately. It’s not a matter of besting you here. It’s a matter of plumbing the parameters of the Colorado film and the NASA clip.

We find that detailed discussions of UFO events continue unabated at some UFO forums, UFO Updates for example. The participants rehash old, classic sightings, mining them for minutiae that won’t solve the UFO mystery or the sighting under rapid but irrelevant discussion.

We’re not looking to do that here.

Your defense of the NASA clip is fascinating. It shows your belief in the idea that some filmed objects or images are unidentified. We’ll give you that.

The Colorado clip shows an unidentified something also, but one that has some specific elements that the NASA UFOs do not have: location, speed – space/time as it were.

The NASA UFOs have neither speed nor location that one can measure – that one can observe. They are in that indeterminate state analogized by Schrodinger’s hypothesis.

WE observe them and see that the UFO phenomenon they represent is dead. You seem to see the images as showing the UFO phenomenon as alive.

We’re both right – apparently.

Nonetheless, the Colorado UFO has a tangible, non-quantum reality – even though it remains unidentified.

One would hope that the discussion, no matter how discursive, would remain civil, even when one’s patience with the dialogue is sorely tested....